Solaris Live Upgrade Workshop — A 1-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

Live Upgrade provides advanced upgrading and patching capabilities on Solaris SPARC and Intel platforms, especially since the 10/08 update 6 release, which introduced ZFS root pools. Boot environments can now be almost instantly cloned for upgrading or patching while the system is live, and once the upgrade or patching is done, only a reboot is required to complete the task. The old boot environment. acts as a backup to fall back to in case of problems. This one-day training course provides a thorough and practical look at Live Upgrade for both upgrading the OS and installing patches. The course utilises both SPARC and Intel systems for the practical sessions, covering both UFS and ZFS boot environments. Additional Live Upgrade facilities are also demostrated, such as the ability to install a boot environment from a Flash Archive.

The course is run using both SPARC and Intel servers. Each student will have exclusive use of a SPARC server to configure and test, and access to an Intel based system. Each attendee will be provided with their own set of comprehensive notes.

Prerequisites

Attendees must have Solaris experience including systems administration and IP network configuration. In particular, knowledge of system disk configuration, file system creation, Solaris installation, ZFS file system operation, and patching is essential.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Contents

Introduction

What is Live Upgrade? An introduction to the major facilities of Live Upgrade, including:-

• Creating one (or more) copies of the currently running system (Boot Environment or BE)
• Upgrading a BE copy to a new Solaris version
• Installing applications, Solaris packages, and patches on a BE
• Installing a flash archive within a BE copy
• Booting from a BE copy
• Reverting back to a previously working BE
• Mounting a BE
• Creating a ZFS pool, creating a BE within it, and migrating an existing system to the new BE

System Requirements and planning

• Hardware requirements for Live Upgrade
• Obtaining and installing the correct patch bundle
• Limitations of Live Upgrade

Create a BE with lucreate

• Create a new boot environment (BE) from the currently running operating environment
• Create a new BE from a BE other than the currently running one
• Re-configure the file systems of a BE when creating a new BE. For example, place (a currently separate) /var and /opt under /, and perform similar operations in reverse to create separate slices from merged file systems
• How Live Upgrade works with BE's containing zones
• Create a BE with empty file systems

Upgrade a BE to a new OS version with luupgrade

• Upgrade a BE to a new version of the Solaris OS from a Solaris distribution medium or a Flash archive
• Check an operating system distribution medium

Other uses for luupgrade

• Extract a Solaris Flash archive to an empty BE
• Add and remove packages within a BE
• Add and remove patches within a BE
• Check or obtain information about packages in a BE

Activation of a BE, booting issues, and reverting back to a previous BE

• Using luactivate to select a BE as the currently active BE
• How files are synchronised between BE's
• Determining which is the currenlty acive BE
• Reverting to a previous BE if problems occur

Using ZFS as a root pool in Solaris 10 U6

• How to create a root ZFS pool, and migrate an existing system to it, upgrading to Solaris 10 U6 along the way!
• Performing Live Upgrade operations on a ZFS root pool without the need for extra disk partitions

Additional Utilities

• The course covers the use of additional utilities including lucancel, lucompare, lucurr, ludelete, ludesc, lufslist, lumake, lumount, lurename and lustatus